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First Patch Ever.

Posted by louiedinh on 2009/10/11

First Patch Ever.

Once my pending patch has been checked into the source tree, I will become a member of the open source community. It doesn’t look like much but it does fix a problem. I take heart from Richard Feynman who said, ” No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.”. Here is a few things I learned:

1. Svn needs a better way to manage patches because pending ones causes a mess. To keep from mangling my patch, I ended up having to checkout another copy to code with. If anyone has a better solution please tell me.

2. Stand on other people’s shoulders. We borrowed a custom test runner to integrate the nose test framework into django during the code sprint (Thanks Jeff!). Then we discovered that he maintains a version of it on github so now we point to the source and save ourselves maintence/installation issues.

3. People on IRC are really nice. I needed help with my patch so I hopped on IRC (mozilla/education). It was nice to have someone who knew a lot about coding and ISPDB (David Ascher) take the time to thoroughly discuss the issues.

One Response to “First Patch Ever.”

onitonysaid

Quite a few of us have been running into similar issues with SVN, especially during the code sprint, when everybody wrote a lot of new code. Git should make things easier, but it’s not trivial to get the entire community around a project to spontaneously switch. I think some students manage to inter-operate Git and Subversion.

FYI, relying on someone’s Github repo for source isn’t ideal, as profiles and projects could disappear (such as when _why left the internet). A suggested approach is to fork a project into an account accessible by multiple developers on the team, and occasionally pull from the main repo.